A photographer prepares to capture the Beijing Olympic Stadium, also known as the “Bird’s Nest.”

Using powerful media servers and storage systems outfitted with Seagate® enterprise hard drives, U.S. TV network NBC plans an unprecedented 3,600 hours of coverage during the Beijing Summer Olympic Games in China—a three-fold increase over coverage of the 2004 Athens Games.

In addition to television programming of the Games, which begin Aug. 8, NBC will broadcast the Olympics via the Web.

"The volume of information that needs to be digitized and transferred between Beijing and the U.S. is immense," said Mark Wojtasiak, global marketing manager for Seagate. "Seagate drives will provide nearly a half million gigabytes of storage for the endeavor."

With its expanded coverage of the Games, NBC needed a way to produce content differently than it had in the past. The network turned to Omneon, a leading supplier of media server and active- storage systems.

As the competitions take place, 20 Seagate Barracuda® drive-equipped Omneon MediaDeck servers, located in China, will digitize and ingest standard and high-definition video feeds. The resulting files become part of a workflow transfer to two Omneon MediaGrid storage systems, equipped with 750-GB Barracuda ES drives from Seagate. The first system, located in Beijing, stores all files and the second, U.S.–based server, some 6,000 miles away, receives only the desired final footage for production editing.

“NBC needs to capture every second of every competition at multiple venues in China, quickly turning them into compelling programming for television and Internet broadcasting,” said Bill Schilling, marketing director at Seagate. “The workflow must be seamless—nothing can fall through the cracks.”

Geoff Stedman, senior vice president of products and markets at Omneon, said Seagate enterprise products were the best fit for Omneon's needs in terms of “reliability, best-in-class design and unrivaled performance.”

Barracuda enterprise drives are designed for applications where high capacity and low-power consumption are critical.

“We welcomed the opportunity to work with Omneon to support NBC for the Olympics,” added  Wojtasiak. “Omneon is the market leader for developing storage solutions for broadcast video, which is becoming more prevalent via the Web. We expect the demand for storage in that area to increase considerably.”

The Olympic Games remain TV's most coveted broadcast event. Networks clamor for exclusive media rights to the Games, and for good reason. During the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, 203 million viewers watched the Olympics via the networks of NBC Universal.